Carousel Designs Blog

I know that in the past when I have been looking for a particular product and I am exploring an unfamiliar industry like a lot of other people I’ll check and see what is the most expensive. It’s human nature to associate price with quality–especially when you simply just don’t know much about the particular products for which you are shopping.

With baby bedding you may start out a searching for “high end baby bedding” or “luxury baby bedding”. You may find baby bedding sold at a particular store and sort by price high-to-low just to see what’s “the best” out there. Being in the crib bedding and juvenile products industry for many years I have seen too often that high prices does not necessarily mean “high end”. In fact, sometimes I am shocked to find a particular bedding collection or crib set that is priced so high (sometimes over $1,000) when the quality of fabrics and workmanship is no better than what we offer.

Factors such as the cost of making the bedding, the number or times the bedding must change hands from manufacturer to store to customer, as well as the brand name, will dictate the price–often it’s not the quality!

At Carousel Designs, we use only the finest fabrics coupled with superior quality standards to manufacture our baby bedding and nursery décor. We’ve been doing this for over 21 years and thoroughly inspect every product that we make before it leaves our shop located in Douglasville, Georgia. Everything is made right here in the USA so it is very easy for us to ensure that every step of the process maintains our strict quality standards.

Since we sell direct to the consumer on our website babybedding.com we are able to pass the savings of having no traditional retail markup along to our customers. Back in the 90’s when we only sold our products to the better baby specialty stores it was typical to find our 4-piece crib bedding sets sold as high as $500-$700. Since then, we have actually continued to improve our quality standards while selling our products at much lower prices. Our current 4-piece crib sets are usually between $200-$300 and as sometimes as low as $99! Check out our outlet section to see many first-quality crib sets offered at deeply discounted prices.

In an era where you’ll find the terms “factory direct” or “direct to the consumer” overused and not always accurate know that you are truly buying directly from the factory with us.

If you have the opportunity, please read some of our customer testimonials. You’ll find several messages submitted by actual customers consistently praising the quality of our bedding and many more saying how they were very “surprised” or “shocked” with the quality. These are real examples where people have traditionally associated price with quality. That’s why you simply can’t measure our quality by comparing prices at Carousel Designs to the prices of baby bedding offered by the competition. It’s apples and oranges.

Jonathan

My name is Jonathan Hartley and back in 1988 my parents Mike and Balva Hartley founded Carousel Designs. Our manufacturing plant in Douglasville, Georgia has been here since the 70’s and prior to Carousel Designs had been owned by a different company which made items such as rubber baby pants and women’s clothing.

In 1988, Carousel Designs launched and concentrated solely on manufacturing crib bedding and nursery décor. We designed, manufactured, and distributed our products for the better baby specialty stores throughout the United States.

The bedding collections we’ve manufactured over the years matched the trends popular at the time, but looking back on those older collections can be quite entertaining.

Here’s one of the originals circa 1989 named “Bashful Bunny”…

Twenty years later we’re still making baby bedding, and the designs have changed quite a bit! (See our newest arrivals)

Allan Sicat (our President), Jason Warren, and I acquired the business over a year ago. Mike and Balva still are involved somewhat, but are enjoying retirement somewhere in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina.

We’ve got a lot of exciting things brewing and stay tuned for some of our future product offerings and website enhancements.

We’ve also recently opened up our latest consumer-facing website which features the tremendous inventory of fabrics we have here at our 20,000 square foot facility. The website is Carousel Fabrics and we offer all of our fabrics in stock at some very competitive prices.

Jonathan